Backing Up: Best Practices

Archiving media and other assets has always been an important issue. But, as video moves away from magnetic tape (e.g., Mini DV tapes) toward solid-state Flash memory (e.g., Panasonic's P2), optical storage (e.g., Sony's PD), hard-drive storage and other media (can we even call it video anymore, now that it is no longer tape-based?), the need to archive has become not only more important but, in many ways, more difficult.

There is little doubt, at least outside the walls of videotape manufacturing companies, that videotape is going the way of floppy disks. I'm pretty sure the generation being born today will someday ask their parents, "What is that stuff they call videotape in those old 2000 movies?" Flash memory, optical storage and hard-drive storage are quickly replacing the linear acquisition format we have been using for the last 58 years.

The process of archiving starts in the very first minutes of your post-production process. In fact, before you even open your editing software to edit your first clip, your archiving should have begun. It all starts with the first folder you make on your media hard drive. This is the one folder to unite them all. The "them all" I am referring to is every single piece of media or asset associated with this project. Every video clip, every voiceover, every song, every still, every title, every graphic - everything . Make this folder, give it a relevant name (e.g., the working title of your project) and make sure every single byte of information relating to this project lives in that folder. There, your archiving job is half done.

Virgos make great editors. Diligence, consistent file naming and organizing are the foundation of effective and easy archiving, not to mention a healthy workflow. If you are not an editor but you're looking to hire one, make sure she/he is a Virgo (full disclosure: I'm a Virgo). Seriously, the more organized an editor is during the long process of editing, the quicker and easier the archiving will be at the end of the project.

All right, now you have made your one folder to unite them all. You have opened your editing software, named and saved your project, set your scratch discs and captured your footage, which you have given a name very similar to your project name. For example, for my ten-part documentary series on the life of snails, I have called my main project folder snail doc . I have named my project file snail project 01 . I named the first three one-hour video clips I captured from my Mini DV tapes snail tape 01, snail source 02 and snail tape 03 . See where I'm going with this? I use a short, unique word for all of my folders and main file names - in this case snail - so, if I do misplace a file, I can search the word snail to find all the files with that one project. This will be a huge help when it comes time to archive.

As they do on cooking shows, let's jump to the end of the process, cutting out all that baking time (editing) and pulling the fully-cooked cobbler, or, in this case, the finished product from the editing "oven." The project is finished, and we're ready to archive, clear our drives, defrag and start the next job. I'm about to describe two archiving workflows: tape-based and non-tape-based. But before we get to the details, there is one procedure common to both: saving the best-quality final-cut version of the project. I call this the full-frame, full-motion copy, or FFFM. This is the copy that we can easily retrieve and send out to festivals, use to make a demo reel or compress for the web. If you shot in 1080i60, this version of the finished product should be saved as 1080i60. If you shot at 720p 24 frames, save your finished product the same way. It doesn't hurt to add an identification board to the front of this video, with white letters at 95% opacity on a black background that state the name of the piece, the date completed, the total running time, the client (if there is one), the editor and the editor's contact information (this is most probably you). I have a one-terabyte drive, set to a RAID 1 (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive/ Independent Disks), which uses the two 500GB encased drives as a redundant or mirrored system. I keep all of my FFFM finished works here. More on RAID 1 in a bit.